Wednesday, 11 September 2013

Brief programme note for Wagner Preludes

(originally written for part of a programme note for the 2013 Salzburg Festival. Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra performed orchestral preludes and overtures by Wagner and Verdi, as well as two new works.)

Richard Wagner (1813–1886)

Prelude to Act One of Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Not the least remarkable thing concerning the Prelude to Act
One of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
is when Wagner composed it, as he wrote in Mein
Leben.

During
a beautiful sunset which transfigured the light I contemplated a splendid view
of “Mainz the Golden” and the majestic Rhine streaming past it, the prelude to
my Meistersinger […] returned
suddenly clear and distinct to my soul. I set about putting the prelude on
paper and wrote it down precisely as it is in the score today, with all the
main themes of the whole drama already definitively formed.

In this Prelude, we hear five of the work’s principal motifs
adumbrated, three of them combined in brazen contrapuntal mastery at the moment
of return to the work’s deceptively wholesome and anything but straightforward
C major tonality. That moment is famously, humorously, signalled by a triangle
stroke. We are introduced to the Mastersingers, to Walther and his impetuous ardour
and to the darker, contemplative, Schopenhauerian tendencies of the opera
before the curtain rises – all before the music to which this overture apparently
refers had been composed. Wagner’s counterpoint, like his character Walther von
Stolzing, disregards tradition. Increasing reverence for Bach notwithstanding,
this is no pastiche, nor even Brahmsian revival. Strauss and Mahler would
admire Wagner’s practice for the same reason the reactionary theorist Heinrich
Schenker would deplore it: themes are yoked together out of ‘dramatic’ rather
than ‘purely musical’ necessity.

Richard Wagner (1813–1886)

Prelude to Act One of Parsifal

Parsifal is a markedly different from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wagner’s
unwieldy designation of Bühnenweihfestspiel
(stage-festival-consecration-play) hints at its distance from anything redolent
of the opera house. We no longer consider it desirable to restrict performances
to Bayreuth, yet something of the mystery play remains. The first act Prelude
prepares us admirably. In its opening bars, we hear presentiments of that love
symbolized in Christ’s body given for us, of Amfortas’s fallen suffering, of
the Grail (the ‘Dresden Amen’), and of that redemption whose substance provides
the greatest of Parsifalian enigmas. Wagner summarized the progression to King Ludwig
II as love, faith, hope. Moreover, as Theodor Adorno would observe, Parsifal
exhibited both Wagner’s ‘late style’ and the ‘still disconcertingly new’; we stand
but a stone’s throw from the opening Adagio of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. ‘Lugubrious
dimming of sound’, as Adorno again describes, moves us closer still to Schoenberg.
Brass-choir religiosity both suggests the church and has us, Amfortas-like in
our agony, doubt whether its truths still hold. Some have wished to identify
Parsifal as Christ; Wagner and we know that we cannot.